Literary Birthday – 1 August – Tomi Adeyemi

Happy Birthday, Tomi Adeyemi, born on 1 August 1993.

Tomi Adeyemi Quotes

1. Nothing is wasted. You can make something out of every unfinished story and every rejection if you work at it. You’re never wasting your time as long as you learn from every single thing you do, whether you feel like those attempts are successful or not.
2. If I could go back, I would’ve told myself that I will be published one day and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
3. You need a community to succeed. In the back of every book is an acknowledgements page full of all the people it took to get that writer to the book you’re holding. With the internet, there are so many ways to connect with other writers who will be some of your best friends and best sources of support for your entire life. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and go meet them!
4. I had about 75 days to outline, write, and revise a 95,000 word fantasy so that I could enter Pitch Wars, which then changed my life and writing career forever.
5. The whole purpose of the book is one: to tell an interesting story. Two: to be a mirror for people like us who have never seen ourselves in these types of stories. And three: for people who have seen themselves to show them what’s going on with their neighbours.
6. Stories change lives. They touch us and connect us individually and allow us to connect to each other.
7. It’s definitely a good idea to put yourself out there to a degree, but a lot of writing is finding yourself, finding your voice and finding your heart. The moment you’re at right now is practice. Like I used to beat myself up for writing 300 pages of Naruto fan fiction and I couldn’t have known at the time that recreating the first 50 episodes of Naruto would help me write battle scenes. Everything you do is training. Even daydreaming is training.
8. The advice I would give is look for a pattern amongst the ideas that have inspired you, whether it’s a piece of dialogue or a question.
9. The most important thing I can say is: you matter, your voices matter, and your stories matter. Whether that’s fiction or poetry or non-fiction or memoir, teenage girls are saving the world right now and they are my entire hope for the future. It’s the most important thing is that people — especially young girls — know that they are warriors and that they matter. And they should write because we need them and we need their stories so that they should create knowing that need is there.

Source for quotes 1-4: Writer’s Digest and quotes 5-9: Assembly

Tomi Adeyemi is a Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning American writer, speaker, and model based in New York. After graduating from Harvard University with an honours degree in English literature, she wrote her groundbreaking, instant #1 New York Times-bestselling Legacy of Orisha series, which includes Children of Blood and Bone, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, and Children of Anguish and Anarchy. The trilogy has sold over three million copies around the world. The film adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone is scheduled to be released by Paramount pictures in the United States on 15 January 2027.

Source for photograph: Wikipedia, Fuzheado, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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